Asian applications- an analysis

APAA, the Asian Patent Attorneys Association, held their Design Committee meeting in Jeju, Korea on 17th October under the joint chairmanship of Minako Mizuno and Peter Heathcote.  The meeting concentrated on practical issues of what can be filed as a design, and included whether:

• designs are available for separate component parts of products,
• designs are available for integral parts of products,
• designs are available for icons,
• multiple designs are available,
• sets are available,
• dashed lines can be used,
• statements of novelty are required.

 You can find the extremely detailed sets of responses from the official groups of Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam on APAA's 2010 website here. 

Indonesia leaves Hague system

Indonesia is leaving the Hague Agreement, effective in one year's time (3rd June 2010, to be precise), according to a WIPO Notice.
Indonesia has been a Hague member for over half a century, allowing people the satisfaction of ticking the box covering the world's fourth most populous country (and largest Muslim country). However, it is only since 2001 (impelled to it by TRIPS) that Indonesia has actually had a registered design law - so presumably, before that time, all those box ticks were just a waste of money (which perhaps could have been made clearer on WIPO's forms).
According to the excellent study by Suratno and Tanaka, when it did arrive the Indonesian design law was a pretty poor fit with Hague anyway, in fact making no mention of it. Swimming against the tide, Indonesia introduced novelty searching in 2004, which made the fit even worse as the 1934 text of Hague to which they had acceeded is a pure deposit system.
The 1999 Geneva Act would be a better fit since it permits countries to search and examine, and perhaps they have denounced the 1934 Act merely in order to accede to the 1999 one - but it is far from clear that this is so, as one would have expected the announcements to occur together.
Does anyone know more of the background?